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Saturday, March 27, 2010

One thing is certain. No matter what your karmic condition of the moment or what territory you are passing through, both internally and externally, your state of being and your circumstances can be exponentially improved by regular meditation.

I like to think of meditation in several ways, though I will only list a couple. One of them I call ‘coring’ and one I call ‘immersion’. Coring operates on a premise that there is an opening in your material state into which light can pour. Let’s just say that your material state is composed of your body; your situation and the way you think and feel about them. Of course, mind and the higher emotions can transcend the physical state but we are talking about getting there, not already being there. Parsers and proponents of certain viewpoints will say that you are already there and realizing it is the key. You can go ahead and apply that to what I am saying if you want. It works either way.

Coring widens the opening through which the light pours and you can visualize yourself working with a variety of imaginary tools to make the opening bigger. Chanting and prayer are tools of this nature and you can see them as actual hand tools being employed for the purpose already mentioned. As you work you can feel a greater degree of light enter in and experience it lightening and revitalizing every part of your being. Most importantly you can feel information from higher dimensions also coming in and presenting themselves in clearer and more understandable ways. Consistency is the key here; consistency and focus or what might also be called, ‘being one-pointed’.

Immersion is best described as believing that the universe is filled with light the way an ocean is filled with water. You can think of it as an ocean of light. You immerse yourself in it and let it bathe your being. You allow yourself to float upon and dissolve into it. You let go of all concerns, thoughts and feelings about anything else. You become part of this light and you remind yourself that it is conscious and conscious of you.

I could go on at length about these ideas and others too but the point here is for the reader to play with the concepts and come up with their own system. All systems work best when they are personalized. A lot of the time people are turned off by certain practices because they seem too generic. It’s like rote and routine. Rote and routine can be useful but only if you breathe life into them and love what you are doing. It is much easier to love what you can identify with. It’s a little like the difference between music you enjoy and music you would rather not listen to.

As has been mentioned here now and again, I am a believer in better living through chemistry. I am also a believer in the obvious truth that we should always be ready to cut things loose and open ourselves up to new ways of being that are improvements upon the old. I am only bringing this up because it has something to do with the next example which follows.

While engaged in the study and practice of different martial arts forms, I noticed that I didn’t enjoy some number of them and it very much hampered my enthusiasm for practice and my ability to get into it when I did. During certain altered states, which also involved playing around with martial arts forms, I discovered that all the movements I was playing with were extensions of an inner awareness of motion applied to a certain purpose. I found that I could manifest my own forms of movement right out of that inner awareness. It is true that they resembled the classical movements of which some of us are familiar but they were different too. They were easier to do and they had a flow and a presence to them that I had not been getting from my previous efforts to improve at something I thought I should know at least a little something about; given the worlds I sometimes had to move through.

As time has passed, these movements have come to have little to do with resolving external conflicts and everything to do with harmonizing internal conflicts and coming into a deeper and more solid balance with Nature. I assume they could easily be applied to external conflicts but these things very seldom appear once the internal conflicts have been addressed. I find I am able to apply the principles I have learned to just about anything I engage in. You name it and it can be performed as an expression of your personal style; your personal Wu Wei, your own kind of effortless action.

The world outside of us is an extension of our mind. You can throw in your emotions too. They are also a part of your mind. Everything is composed of mind stuff of varying density. It is true that the world is in a tense period of transition. We all agree that there are certain things in evidence. This might also be the result of mass hypnosis or collective illusion too. In a cosmic sense it certainly is. You alter your internal world and you will find that your external world will change around you.

Meditation greases the wheels of your existence. Meditation shapes the plastic mindstuff. Some of us are quicker and more efficient at it because we are deeper into it and have been doing it longer. Some people are much better swimmers because of having applied themselves more. But... there’s another thing to consider. Some people are just more naturally disposed to and capable of certain things. There’s karma involved and some of us have been working at certain things for more than one lifetime; all of us have, in fact. That’s where you get 12 year old concert violinists from.

Everyone can meditate but some are going to be better at one method than another and that is why you have to find what works for you because you won’t be doing it for very long and certainly without real results unless you find your personal style. You’ll give up.

A dimensional shift is coming. You can think of it as a really enormous holographic flying saucer that will be lowering a ramp once it gets close to the Earth. You can think of the ramp as being composed of sound, vibrating at a certain frequency. If your frequency is sympathetic to or resonating with it, then you can glide right up the ramp into this saucer of consciousness.

Upon entering the ship, your consciousness will be further altered so that you are now able to perceive things you could not see or hear before. It will directly impact on your consciousness so that you can think and comprehend in ways you could not before. You will have access to new senses of perception that have been foretold in some of the chemistry experiments that early pioneers experienced; although in a temporary sense. Eventually they integrated back into the same old same old. Albeit they were somewhat changed and certain information and abilities remained with them but... in the case of this dimensional shift you are going to be changed in a way that continues and does not return back into the same old same old. The same old same old will be a thing of the past except for those who are determined to continue living in it. There will be, as there already are, parallel dimensions. It’s something to look for and to seek after and meditation is one of the powerful tools available to you in terms of preparation and making ready.

In future posts we are going to talk about some of the other tools; tools you will be using when you are not meditating. I’ll be talking about this same subject on this Sunday night’s radio show.

Think of it as something like learning to drive a car. Think of it as familiarizing yourself with the controls of an unfamiliar machine. Think of it as being ready instead of not being ready and rising to meet it in the air. It is quite possible that those too deeply immersed into the denser regions of material consciousness will not even know it is taking place. You don’t want to be one of those. The divine is compassionate beyond our ability to know ...so... all efforts are being made to reach everyone; even if that means trauma and bowel shaking fear. Be one of those who can awaken from a gentle touch on the shoulder.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

You hear people all the time saying that it’s better to be honest and truthful but that doesn’t seem to bear out in the wider world. People can become very quickly outraged by honest and true speech. In the defense of this certain event we restrain our honest nature and shade our truth. Most people know what’s going on and they do a little dance and then pat themselves and each other on the back for what amounts to casual dishonesty and deceit.

Anytime I’m around other people I see it all the time. It’s mostly unconscious, this ‘go along to get along’ thing. People forge powerful reputations based on how they appear to be. A lot of them have private lives and some of them pay people to enhance the way they appear in the world and to camouflage what might upset the other hypocrites. I suspect a lot of people don’t actually know what hypocrisy is.

The dictionary says this about hypocrisy; a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess; a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude. I think it can also be defined as saying one thing and doing another. Hypocrisy is not the personal shared exposure of one’s true behavior, former and present. It’s not a public revelation by one about one’s weaknesses and shortcomings; quite the opposite in fact. However, one anonymous poster accused me of hypocrisy for my being honest about these things. What this is, is a no win situation.

I suppose I should apologize for being honest and truthful. I should keep my private life private and manifest a stable and consistent posture, saying all the right things and working that whitened sepulcher thing. I thought I had good reason for doing otherwise because it presents the clear evidence that one is not better than you. I thought that was desirable for some reason but it appears to be the reverse.

Talking about politics and religion is sure to cause an argument and that is why many intelligent and aware souls avoid talking about them. With religion and politics, a good argument can be made for just about any point of view and the same applies to philosophy which is why there are so many of them. There are a lot of religions and political points of view as well. Within the major groups there are literally hundreds of splinter groups covering all of the extremes and middle ground.

I believe it to be true that religion has less to do with God than it does with operating a business. Politics has much less to do with social equity and helping people than it does with self-advancement and deals with the devil. Philosophies are endlessly adjusted to incorporate personal preferences. One changes their philosophy to suit the justification of their behavior instead of the other way around. Sure, sometimes people adjust their behavior to suit the philosophy but this often gets them ostracized and marginalized because they’re not playing the game and they make everyone else look bad, which is how it should be but no one likes it.

We live in a time of rampant alcoholism and prescription drug addiction. We also live in a time of epidemic casual sex, which now regularly happens as soon as puberty arrives if not before. We live in a time where the rich and the powerful take full advantage of this and they use and trade young people like baseball cards. They’re a commodity and the ability to indulge without fear of consequence is a sign that you have arrived. It’s just another perk like huge bonuses and not having to pay any taxes.

Hypocrites see nothing wrong with the use of alcohol and prescription drugs but they are experts on the dangers of illegal drugs. Apparently they do not know that prescription drugs kill far, far more people than illegal drugs and that alcohol kills more people in a year than illegal drugs do in a century or more. One of the reasons that certain drugs are illegal is because they open your eyes to what’s going on. Alcohol and prescription drugs do the opposite. Social controllers at the political and religious level demand suppression of the use of illegal drugs because they do not want people thinking outside the box. There’s no argument that can be given to continue to make marijuana illegal when alcohol and tobacco are not. Some illegal drugs are definitely not good for you and you’ll get no argument from me about them.

Enormous sums are spent to make war on people who can barely defend themselves while the bare minimum is spent on bettering the lives of the people living in the countries that make the wars. Money is cynically given to vested interests under the guise of helping people who have to live in these bombed out wastelands but it never gets to them The level of hypocrisy among our political and religious leaders is staggering. It’s off the charts.

People engaging in all manner of non mainstream sexual activities have armies of lawyers who rush in wherever there is a complaint about unfair practices, like the girl in Mississippi who wanted to take another girl to a prom. Mississippi is not New York City where anything goes. Community standards have a right to be upheld and certain parts of the country have the right to maintain them according to the wishes of the majority. There’s a lot of sophistry at work.

Some would say that people have the right to be themselves wherever they are. I don’t agree with that. My feeling is that you move to where you are tolerated and don’t make waves until you’re old enough to do so. I’m sure all sorts of people have arguments against this but I think it is common sense more than anything else and you can’t legislate morality in either direction. It doesn’t work, period. Besides the hidden agenda on the part of those who are trying to force certain behaviors on every community, there is no way to make everyone equal without making a lot of other people unequal. People have the right to demand certain standards in their communities and if you don’t like it, hit the road. There are plenty of places you can go and be among your peers. Some people just like noise and attention. There’s also money in it. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

People fall in love with you when you tell them what they want to hear. They fall right out of love with you when you don’t. As our awareness expands, so does our area of influence. The stars in the sky were once individuals like you and I. These stars are not close together and they shine alone. The rulership of our sun changes every three to four hundred million years. I think its somewhere around that number. What is possible for us is much more than we suspect but mostly we are content to behave in ways that beasts are not inclined to do. We have unlimited potential but we do not rise to it. We squander a most precious human birth and there’s no telling where we will wind up later on. We place terrible limits upon ourselves in order to conform to a sick system and enjoy a common fellowship in darkness. We tolerate and support the most heinous acts and call it patriotism. For some reason I am not inclined to accept this.

Certainly it is politically expedient to get behind all the self-indulgent excesses of everyone and call it freedom when it’s no more than license. Telling the truth pisses people off because you are messing with their income and power structure. Every interest group just wants to be more powerful than the others. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about money, influence and power.

Trying to be honest and truthful besmirches one’s reputation and makes them a target so maybe it’s better not to say anything because, sooner or later, you are going to run afoul of money, influence and power. It might be your job for awhile but it’s no walk in the park; you just begin to feel tarnished by the prevailing, general misconceptions about the meaning of life. The amount of people walking a fine line with their eyes on the upward road has always been a very small minority. Many of them are celebrated once they are gone but an unwelcome and general pain in the ass while they are still around.

It’s not easy to know what to do and what to say. It’s all trial and error. We just hope we will be guided and have the good sense to reach for an understanding of that guidance. We’re at a critical point in history and a critical point in our own history as well. I don’t know what else to say so I will say no more.

Friday, March 19, 2010

It’s been said that harmony is the prerequisite to beauty and Pythagoras was into harmony. He came up with the concept of the ‘music of the spheres’ and developed it into a system, a science or a theory; as you prefer. I began to study in the occult and metaphysical sciences at a pretty early age and that’s where I got my concepts and understanding of history. It is amazing how much divergence there is between official, state approved history and occult history. Not much happened the way we’ve been told and the point of that is to keep us uniformed and confused, as well as to make us accept present day injustices, justified by previous events that never happened or certainly didn’t happen the way we’ve been told.

Some things you can’t question without fear of a prison sentence. You never get a really good explanation for this because... well, because there aren’t any.

This kind of manufactured thought control is for the purpose of crowd control and also a license to steal and assume exclusivity. It’s interesting to note that nothing in Nature is exclusive in the same way. Everything works together and maintains a general balance, which is a prelude to harmony which is a prelude to beauty. These days there are no more guidelines for beauty and symmetry and the classical view is often considered passé and unhip. Some pretty ugly things are considered beautiful now and the extremes press outward by the day.

Back in the more civilized times of Pythagoras, there were deeper understandings which were shared by those industrious and diligent enough to discover them. I wish I presently lived in another time because in this one, the ruling family is King Trivia and Queen Banal and the anus is an organ of speech.

My understanding of the music of the spheres is the sounds generated by the planets rubbing against each other. I’ve even felt and heard it when in a heightened state of awareness; thank god for psychedelics. Some people don’t like me mentioning these things. They’re quite comfortable with more dangerous and less enlightening substances but as for the hidden side of the mind and heart’s potential, they’ve got too much daddy and mommy in their heads. By now they’ve turned into their parents and lay the same crap on their children’s consciousness that got laid on theirs.

In more rarified times one wouldn’t need psychedelics and if one were to be lucky enough to have the attentions of a real spiritual master they wouldn’t need them either but this is a period of dense materialism and it can be very hard to see outside of it at times; not that that bothers most people who prefer the variety and pleasures of the mortal body appetites.

One thing I have noticed that is different between an altered state and ordinary consciousness is that in the former I am very aware that the ineffable loves me. In ordinary consciousness I am often not certain of that and it puzzles me. In the altered state I hear wonderful things and am assured over and over of the affections of the universe and the ruling consciousness. In ordinary consciousness I am often threatened and messed with. I wonder why that is?

The altered state is more real than the ordinary consciousness and that’s something I’m certain of and no argument will sway me; much less, the arguments of people who have no experience in these matters. That’s another thing I find simply amazing; how people who have no experience and no reference points can be so damned sure of something they know nothing about when some of us have many years of direct experience in these matters. They might want to read this if they have the patience. It makes for a good argument and I’ve copies for those who have the temperament for it.

This isn’t about getting high or being straight. I’m just setting up a scenario so that I can explore this condition; the condition where one state of mind presents the universe as a conscious and loving entity and the other generates uncertainty and fear. I’ve come to believe that there is a material consciousness that is interposing itself between us and the true version of what is. Something unpleasant has hi-jacked a particular segment of bandwidth and is broadcasting negative messages that aren’t real.

Because of what’s coming the planets are in a certain relationship to each other and the music they are giving voice to is disconcerting. It’s shaking things up on surface and on deeper levels. It’s become near impossible in present time to maintain a consistent sense of harmony; speaking only for myself at the moment. I have to take steps to shield myself, which is difficult because I blew a lot of those shields away in an effort to get beyond the gravitational pull; outside the deceptive network of time and the temporal. I’m a sitting duck in some ways.

If you’re not being harassed it could be that it isn’t necessary since you are already in the paddock or are wearing the collar of cooperation. Once you have the collar of cooperation on and the heplock drip line you don’t require special attention and you can do your time at the Paris Hilton or in line at the social services until your next posting is announced.

I’ve become adept at a few small things and dancing is one of them and I will tell you that the dances of the moment require a lot of fancy footwork and the larger portions doesn’t involve the feet. There’s the sensation of being two dimensionalized in a forty ton press... if you’re not careful. Life has become something of an apple press. So what do you do? You keep your head down and remind yourself that you really are loved, no matter how hard it might be to feel it. It’s like a 24/7 replay of that footprints in the sand routine without the comfort of the understanding.

It’s going on two years for me now with barely a respite overall. You know how it is when you have back pain and become less tolerant of people? I don’t have back pain but it’s like that. Part of you wants to lash out just for the exercising of the tension but that doesn’t lead anywhere except into the Valley of Self Recrimination. You only have to go there a few times before you realize you don’t want to go back. You carry your wound and you hold your mud and you grow a stiff upper lip.

I’ve never seen it to be as difficult as it is now and easily as difficult to find the necessary palliatives and comestibles. I think I got put in Al Gore’s lockbox with the missing social security and I can hammer on the lid all I want. The usual portals provided by prayers and chants are sealed and you can bet this is going to prompt some Jesus junkie to set me straight on why. One things is for sure, I’ll take where I am any day over anything they are hawking because that is another collar of control and heplock drip line only it’s got big hair and a gold watch.

I’m not meaning to depress you folks out there but merely to articulate what I think a lot of us are feeling so that you don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. We’ll get through this I don’t doubt but it does appear that what we have been anticipating and in some cases dreading has finally made its way to the ‘any day now’ demographic.

I wish I could offer you shelter from the storm but that’s not my department. My department is to tell you that there is one even if I can hardly see it much of late. I know it’s there because I have seen it and some things you have to take on faith and this is one of those times. Whatever is going into operation is relevant to those it applies to.

Sometimes when you are digging you hit a layer of rock. There’s no telling how deep it runs but you have to bore through it cause that’s how it is. The hardest thing in the world is to keep going when the highway feels too long. You could fall down and die by the side... and some do or... you can keep on keeping on and that seems to be the mindset of the day and it is damn well going to be in place tomorrow too and the day after that and the day after that. I’ll see you up the road.

Friday, March 12, 2010

The beloved spiritual master, A.C, Bhaktivedanta wrote a book called “Easy Journey to other Planets”. Although I have never read the book, I know what it’s about because I came into the same reality by another route and that’s what I want to talk about tonight. That book, the title of that book, has been running through my head for weeks now. It keeps coming up. Sometimes I see the book cover in my mind when I close my eyes.

So many seriously strange things have happened to me in this life that the present, regular appearance of inexplicable phenomena is just more of the same. It’s strange now? It’s always been strange. The intensity and landscape vary but supernatural coffee is always percolating underneath the stage sets.

Before I went on my internet free journey I had begun doing the Hare Krishna-Hare Rama chant. It gradually increased its presence and replaced the Tara Chant which had previously replaced the Ganesha chant. It wasn’t long before I began to notice the particular power of the chant and also that it was much more personally in tune with me than the others.

All of my life I’ve been searching for the divine, even when I didn’t know what I was searching for. It’s led me for a period of time into just about every religious tapestry. One thing remained true through it all. The Eastern Traditions proved to be a more comfortable fit.

I wonder sometimes about Christians. I believe that Jesus was the son of God and I believe in what he had to say. As far as the miracles and the rising from the dead, that’s easy. I know God can accomplish anything. Rising from the dead is small potatoes in relation to what the divine is capable of. If we knew what we were capable of we would very quickly find ourselves deeply committed to seeking union with the divine.

I don’t see where any of what is said here conflicts with Jesus Christ. There’s an important thing that I think is generally overlooked and that is that the Bible does not contain everything that happened. People think the story is complete. It’s very much incomplete. Jesus went missing in the book for 17 years. It’s not a wrong assumption to believe that there’s a lot more to the story than what’s on paper.

Believing that the Bible contains everything is a limiting condition. It confines us to only what is written down and cuts off reflection upon the immeasurable possibilities of the divine. Do you catch my drift? There’s an unconscious assumption across the board that it all got written down. It didn’t.

This is why one will never realize the divine unless they go within where it all is. The body is a grave that conceals a spark of light. In our lives there is a period of time that we are given to connect with this light. This is the purpose of life. It has no other purpose. The divine experiences and realizes itself in the human state. If you don’t connect to the light during the time period; the length of your particular cassette, you get recycled. You might get recycled anyway but after a different fashion. “We shall not all die but we shall all be changed”.

I remember Christians coming up to me with a messianic gleam and asking me if I was saved. I would reply, “Yes” because it happens to be true. That was too easy for them and so they had to dissect the elements of my salvation. This inevitably led to my not being saved, according to them. There were some very specific agreements and understandings that had to take place. I was in agreement and understanding of all of them, according to the way I interpreted the meaning. This would lead inevitably to finding something, somewhere, somehow that indicated that I was not saved. It reminded me of lawyers looking for case histories that they could enter into evidence or present to the judge to show precedence, only in reverse; if that makes sense (grin).

You look at the word Christ and the word Krishna and it’s a no brainer. I can find parallels for nearly everything in Eastern thought that Western thought presents. During the night of my kundalini awakening, I remember looking at some western pen and ink pictures on the wall. They were of knights on horseback. As I looked at them they morphed back and forth from West to East and I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that they are the same, only differing in appearance. This is what everyone argues about... appearances.

The divine is invisible but we can see it in operation all around us should we choose to. We can see, convincingly, the total absence of God or the total presence of God depending on what we prefer to believe. In my own case, I have had so much direct experience that it’s beyond doubt, yet... I still experience doubt and separation every single day. I’m learning that these conditions automatically present themselves at regular intervals and our job is not to attach to them; not to think that the doubt and separation are our own. Everything that comes into our minds is not born of our being. There’s only one mind and these thoughts are fishes that swim in it. They travel all over the world and enter into every head. A master is subjected to this just as we are but it doesn’t affect.

Everything real and enduring is built out of love... Love is the key to success in anything and everything; loving what you do makes it come alive. Loving another makes both of you glow. The enemy of love is selfishness. We learn to be selfish. Life shows us the practicality of it and implies we would have much less without it.

Chanting, for me, is a way of weaving a magic carpet. Like a real carpet, it takes time and industry. Eventually you can ride that carpet to other worlds. I am not the only one to discover this. Other readers here know this. Love holds the particles of the carpet together and the sound current is very much like a highway ocean you sail on... vibrate over... swim along.

Personally I have no beef with anyone. Smoking Mirrors is an enigma to me but then I realize that it’s a kind of bait for this place. This place has, all along, gotten 10% of what Mirrors gets. Of course, Mirrors gets linked much, much more but still... that’s the way it goes. The general interest is much more upon the operation of the world than the operation of the divine, even though the world is just a small extension of it.

When one chants one can travel on a carpet of sound to the land of one’s focus. I remember two years ago... one afternoon during a meditation that lasted several hours that I found myself looking into a long and very large corridor that ended in a brilliant light. The light seemed to be an entity but I could not distinguish him. There were shapes and forms all around it and they grew brighter the closer they were to the light. I hovered there on the edge of seeing but never actually seeing. Still, it was an impressive period and a memorable experience.

As we dig deeper into the dirt and darkness of ourselves, we create a larger and larger opening through which the light can pass and also illuminate our progress. Some have to dig harder and deeper than others and those are the ones who are less inclined to dig; for some reason it works like that, the same way that more talents got added unto that particular servant in that particular parable.

I look at chanting and devotional practice as power tools and even when using real power tools, which I do most days, I imagine that they are also being applied to a similar end, regardless of the actual project I am engaged in. It seems fruitful to me to turn every activity into an act of celebrating and recognizing the presence of the divine. No doubt there are other modalities but these serve here for the moment.

In the tension and uncertainty of the times we should not forget that immense blessings of awareness are being conferred to those who put themselves in a position to receive them and there are other blessings too. Personally, I can't visualize doing anything else. Everything else is ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Visible sings: ♫ Every Day ♫'Every Day' is track no. 11 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'Lyrics(pops up)

Friday, March 05, 2010

When you are talking to a dog and you say his or her name and then you chatter on about being a ‘good dog’ or a bad dog’ and whatever you have to say; impressed or depressed by certain behavior, what the dog hears is its name and then something on the order of “quack, quack, quack, quack”. It could be any series of sounds that don’t make sense to the dog.

Some dogs can recognize a number of words that translate into actions. Most house pets don’t get a great deal but they can be reached through the subconscious the same way we can. You have heard about people who go to sleep with a problem in mind and then wake up with the solution. You can also impress things on your subconscious and, over time, modify your consciousness, your behavior... just about anything. This is the purpose of the Tarot. Fortune telling is not the purpose but that is the level that people who are of the house pet variety see it. It seems a little redundant and deluded to want to ‘attempt’ to predict the future with a particular medium when you can actually alter the future with the same medium. The future isn’t entirely fixed.

Some elements of the future are fixed, such the conditions one might find themselves in and people one might encounter but the level at which one enters the condition and/or meets the people is variable. By example; you can show up drunk for a particular event or you could show up at the top of your form. Your condition would have a telling impact on what might take place.

The Tarot speaks to the subconscious mind in pictures and symbols. That is how the subconscious mind processes information. Consider the nature of dreams. The ninth trump is called Strength. It shows a woman dressed in white with her arms around a red lion. According to the tradition I follow, she is opening its mouth to speak. This card stands for the modification of forces below the level of self-consciousness and it is the stage preceding mastery. I’m being overly simplistic here because I want to avoid getting into complex explanation for the sake of brevity and making a general point. This isn’t even about the Tarot, nor is it a suggestion to make use of it. The same results can be attained in various modalities.

The dog sees us as God. We’ve got hands to open the icebox. We make food appear. We’re at a whole other level. In a certain way we are dogs in relation to the divine who has other hands (see Hindu posters of the deities) and can open other iceboxes and provide certain foods we don’t know how to access.

A dog’s consciousness is modified by its association with human consciousness. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. A human being is modified by its contact with the divine. This is a good thing that can sometimes take the appearance of a bad thing depending on what you get put through to increase your contact with the divine. The end result is positive but the terrain you pass through can be trying. Seeking communication and union with the divine is not for the faint of heart.

We cannot access the divine directly; rather let me say that generally this doesn’t happen. Most people would be burned to a cinder. Our contact has to take place through a series of filters. Angels serve a purpose in this respect. The divine has a variety of mediums with which to reach human consciousness and we have a variety of routes by which to approach the light. It could be said that they all work out to be the same thing, such as when Jesus says, “No man comes unto the father save by me”, “I am the way, the truth and the light”. Other religions might object to the implied exclusivity of this but the essence of the thing doesn’t contradict other religions.

We carry on far too many pointless arguments in our heads and they lead nowhere. It’s a lot like a dog chasing his tail. I often think of the childlike quality that is recommended for those seeking the kingdom of Heaven. I fancy it because it gets results. It can be very profitable to consider why this is. Often we turn thoughts over in our head in a very casual way and do not give them a deeper scrutiny. Often we do not even scrutinize the manner by which thoughts appear in our head and why that occurs to begin with. There’s a great little pamphlet from some decades ago called, “As a Man Thinketh”.

People very often wind up at the end of their lives with a great deal of regret and emptiness. They obtain senility instead of regenerated innocence. They have the TV going all the time instead of the still small voice within. When they were young they were oh so confident about who they were and where they were going; not that they actually knew. Now they have no idea who they are or who they were and can’t even remember their past with any degree of accuracy.

The trump that precedes Strength is called The Chariot and its general meaning is, ‘triumph in the mind’. You have to get control of your mind. Nothing is going to work for you until you do and you can hardly move on to anything greater in a metaphysical way until you do. This takes work and relentless application but most people can’t see the point of it. Professionals in certain lines of work can definitely see the point of it or they won’t be much good at what they do.

I’m approaching this in a very elementary way. However, simplicity is a very important feature of success. It’s been said that even an illiterate person can attain illumination. The mind likes to complicate things and this obscures the way.

Dogs take upon themselves the characteristics of their owners. Seekers take on the characteristics of the divine or whatever archetype or animal nature they are seeking to emulate or wind up emulating; aware of it or not.

People identify themselves to themselves (and to others) according to their color; race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, profession and a host of things they associate with themselves and this conceals what they really are. We are none of these things and thinking we are... is a serious mistake. It’s a death sentence. After a certain manner one might say that all death is suicide. In the Bible it says, “We shall not all die but we shall all be changed”. We can look at that statement and many another scriptural statement and just gloss over it without deeper scrutiny. What’s the point of reading it in the first place if you don’t want to understand the deeper meaning? A partial effort comes to nothing or at the very best yields inconsistent results.

I’ve said before that the world looks like a mental institution to me. I mean this literally. It’s a remarkable self-defense mechanism to be able to identify different pathologies when you encounter them. You can’t always treat the patient but you can anticipate their madness and potential and not only inoculate yourself against it but avoid the consequences of engagement. This might seem a little cynical but you have to know what is and is not within your abilities and sometimes getting out of the way is the only alternative. This is what I got from the martial arts. My days of actual physical contact in this respect are long gone except for maintaining a certain level of ability and flexibility for reasons of mobility and health. These days the matter takes care of itself before it becomes a concern (raps on head with knuckles and says, “Knock on wood”.). It’s a lot like bullfighting but without the red cape.

Things like the Tarot and other interesting disciplines from earlier times can be very, very useful in many, many ways. When one can communicate with their dog (metaphorically speaking) one can often do some surprising things. One’s mind, which is very much like a monkey, can become one’s greatest ally instead of one’s most remorseless enemy. A great many of the residents of the animal kingdom symbolize activities, conditions and states of being in the human realm but... once again, we don’t look deeper. We don’t scrutinize intently and carefully. Many of us move through life like a pinball and wind up in the same location (metaphorically speaking) as the pinball.

Most of what we think we know about life is not what life is about. Life has a single purpose and engaging in anything else just means you go round and round and round and round until you discover it.